Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas. Discusses Procedural Terrain, Vegetation and Architecture generation. Also OpenCL, Voxels and Computer Graphics in general.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Last weekend I took some time to add a new feature to the engine. It is some sort of mesh instancing system that brings additional detail on top of the geometry output. It can be used to add a new vegetation layer under trees, like the following images show:

I will be using it for rocks, pebbles, even man-made elements sticking out of the blocks you place.

Polygon counts are now escalating quickly because of this. My old 4770 still averages 40 FPS at 1080p but begins to struggle. It is still manageable, there are some polygons right now I can cut.

This one was long needed. I will be posting a video later so you guys can see how the LOD transitions are managed. I think this has improved a lot.

Monday, February 18, 2013

I like writing everything from scratch, but not everyone shares this form of dementia.

Many in the past have asked whether any of this would run on mainstream game engines. I could not see a reason why not. The VoxelFarm engine outputs traditional polygons, in theory it could be plugged into any engine using polygons for rendering, physics, etc. That remained a nice theory until recently. Now we have some hard proof:

This screnshot shows the VoxelFarm realtime engine providing polygons for terrain in Unity.

Here is are a video. It shows a simple physics test and a little bit of walking. The capture speed and resolution is not good, but hopefully you will get the idea.

I understand if this tech is to be widely used, it will likely come in the form of plugins for mainstream engines. So think this is very encouraging news.